Researcher, Safety Oversight

About the Team

The Safety Systems team is responsible for various safety work to ensure our best models can be safely deployed to the real world to benefit the society, and is at the forefront of OpenAI’s mission to build and deploy safe AGI, driving our commitment to AI safety and fostering a culture of trust and transparency.

The Safety Oversight Research team aims to fundamentally advance our capabilities to maintain oversight over frontier AI models, and leverage these advances to ensure OpenAI’s deployed models are safe and beneficial. This requires a breadth of new ML research in the areas of human-AI collaboration, reasoning, robustness, and scalable oversight to keep pace with model capabilities.  We invest heavily in developing novel model and system-level methods of identifying and mitigating AI misuse and misalignment. 

Our goal is to learn from deployment and distribute the benefits of AI, while ensuring that this powerful tool is used responsibly and safely.

About the Role

OpenAI is seeking a senior researcher with a passion for AI safety and experience in safety research. Your role will set directions for research to maintain effective oversight of safe AGI and work on research projects to identify and mitigate misuse and misalignment in our AI systems. You will play a critical role in defining how a safe AI system should look in the future at OpenAI, making a significant impact on our mission to build and deploy safe AGI.

In this role, you will:

• Develop and refine AI monitor models to detect and mitigate known and emerging patterns of misuse and misalignment.

• Set research directions and strategies to make our AI systems safer, more aligned, and more robust.

• Evaluate and design effective red-teaming pipelines to examine the end-to-end robustness of our safety systems, and identify areas for future improvement.

• Conduct research to improve models’ ability to reason about questions of human values, and apply these improved models to practical safety challenges.

• Coordinate and collaborate with cross-functional teams, including T&S, legal, policy and other research teams, to ensure that our products meet the highest safety standards.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Are excited about OpenAI’s mission of building safe, universally beneficial AGI and are aligned with OpenAI’s charter

• Show enthusiasm for AI safety and dedication to enhancing the safety of cutting-edge AI models for real-world use.

• Bring 4+ years of experience in the field of AI safety, especially in areas like RLHF, human-AI collaboration, fairness & biases.

• Hold a Ph.D. or other degree in computer science, machine learning, or a related field.

• Thrive in environments involving large-scale AI systems.

• Possess 4+ years of research engineering experience and proficiency in Python or similar languages.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity. 

We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

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